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About Geoff McDonald

Author Archive | Geoff McDonald

Book of the Year 2017 Best Books 2017? Over the past decade – since I started Book Rapper – I’ve often been asked by friends and colleagues to recommend my best books to read. During this time, I’ve read over 450 books fuelled by an annual goal to read 50 books. This year (2017) I…

Top 10 Business Books Business Book of the Year What are the top 10 business books for 2018? And what is your book of the year? Each year, I aim to read 50 books. In 2018, I fell a few short and read 40 books. Still a good result. From this list of books I’ve…

Leadership Development What are the best business books to read for leadership development? For a long while I had dismissed leadership development as a topic overblown by it’s own self-importance. For me, so many of the best business books that I had read (over 450 in the past decade) talked about leadership as if they…

The Best Business Books What are the best business books to increase productivity? I have a strong personal interest in this question. As I wrote in my book Done: How to finish your projects when traditional ways don’t work, I had a serious problem finishing things – at one point I had over 25 half-written…

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash Project management challenges Despite the best planning in the world, there are always going to be project management challenges. Typically, these include: Not meeting deadlinesUnclear goals and objectivesTeam issuesCommunication challengesTechnical problems Scope creepRisks to manage and avoid If you believe Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.Wikipedia Overcoming obstacles…

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash What is Planning? It’s such a common word, but what specifically do we mean when we say ‘we are going to do some planning’? The word ‘plan’ is a heteronym, which means it can be both a verb (action/doing word) and a noun (a thing). The action of planning is often spoken about…

Photo by Massimo Sartirana on Unsplash Accountability Meaning, Definition What do we mean when we say ‘accountability’? I believe ‘to be held to account’ is an important management idea, except it’s almost become a cliché. Or, as political writer Don Watson might have called it ‘a weasel word’ – a concept we use to mask over what’s really…

Photo by Emma Matthews on Unsplash Project Tasks and Planning All task lists need to start with a project. One of the key reasons that I started Project Done and wrote my books Done and Weekly Done was to help other people get more done. What I often found when talking to people was that they had a…

Photo by Seth kane on Unsplash What does overwhelm mean? I used to suffer a lot from overwhelm. I’d be in a situation and all of a sudden it would all get too much and I’d have a meltdown and let off some steam. What does overwhelm mean? And is there science about how we get stressed out?…

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash Work Smart We’ve all been told at some point that we need to work smarter to get more work done. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself: What does it mean to ‘work smart’? The holy grail of productivity is to: get more of the right results done in less time…